Archive for the ‘Gadgets’ Category

Review: Genie PowerLift Excelerator

Posted on July 8th, 2008 by Shan

So, last fall I bought a Genie PowerLift Excelerator garage door opener from Home Depot. I decided to go with a higher-end opener because of the nice warranty graphics on the box touting their superior warranty. It turns out to have been a great decision.
Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed that the garage door [...]

Review: Aiptek Action HD Camcorder

Posted on May 8th, 2008 by Shan

I got sucked into a spontaneous purchase the other day at Wal-Mart. I was walking by and saw they had an Aiptek Action HD Camcorder. It has several key features that had caught my eye in the previous weeks:

It’s cheap ($199)
It’s HD

I was in the market for a cheap, small, HD camcorder, and this seemed [...]

Apple’d and loving it

Posted on April 27th, 2008 by Shan

I’ve just realized that over the past 12 months I’ve gone Apple. It started innocently enough with a Juniper iTunes credit card and an iPhone on launch day last June. Then an Apple TV found it’s way into my home. Eventually, a MacBook and a Mac Pro followed suit.
I have to say I’m impressed with [...]

Protecting your gadgets / home office

Posted on April 6th, 2008 by Shan

Someone that I follow in twitter had a near-death experience yesterday… They dropped their camera, and their lens stopped working for a bit. For those of you without DSLR cameras, you might not realize that good lenses go for $300-1600 and up.
Anyway, so I started telling them about the Personal Articles policy I got added [...]

So, less than a year after we got a ColdHeat Freestyle glue gun, the original and spare (extended life) batteries we got are dying. They now barely hold a charge. I called them up and ordered three more spares a couple weeks ago, and they said they’d arrive in 5-10 business days.
15 business days later, [...]

First encounter with e-ink

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 by Shan

I’ve been hearing about e-ink for awhile now, but I came across my first actual sighting in Walmart here in Janesville.

I originally noticed it because it’s a giant ad hanging from the shelf. Then, when it started flipping, I knew exactly what it was…

The thing seemed to be powered by a small battery, possibly off-the-shelf [...]

Big Fat iPhone SDK “gotcha”

Posted on March 7th, 2008 by Shan

So I had an idea for a great iPhone app that now appears will never happen.
Why, you ask? Because Apple wants to have super-strict control of the user experience. The problem is hidden in the documentation… A nice little limitation that gets but a paragraph mention.
The iPhone will only allow a single 3rd party application [...]

Flash on the iPhone?

Posted on February 11th, 2008 by Shan

First time I’ve heard rumors that Flash was actually on it’s way to the iPhone.
http://www.gearlive.com/news/article/q108-flash-on-iphone-is-just-around-the-corner/
I have faith that this will happen, even if it has to wait till Adobe gets access to the SDK along with the rest of the world. Let’s hope it’s already done, and they’re just testing it.

iPhone Google Maps using outdated data!

Posted on January 15th, 2008 by Shan

So, I was going to a party this past weekend, and I forgot to grab directions. No problem, I’ll just pop the address into my TomTom Go 700. Uh oh, the address can’t be found. Well, that’s ok… I saw the house on Google Maps online, I’ll just look it up on my iPhone.
Except when [...]

Apple, *PLEASE* Announce Flash on the iPhone at Macworld

Posted on December 28th, 2007 by Shan

I hope that this year there’s one more iPhone feature… Flash on the iPhone. There’s probably going to be an update on the SDK, and what better way to show their support to the developers by announcing that Adobe’s been using the SDK to write a native Flash Player plugin? The only way they could [...]